New Macs, function key strips
Tue, Aug 30th 2016 4:00a Ben PooleBy most measures, Apple is well overdue a refresh of its Mac and MacBook lines: 2016 has seen nothing on that score, and the latest press event announced for next week doesn’t really tell us any more. One of the more persistent rumours for the new machines, whenever they may turn up, states that the row of function keys on the new MacBooks will be replaced by some kind of context-sensitive “touch strip”
Sweet baby Moses, if this is true then I hope to all that is holy that App

17

VMWare Fusion tip: drag n drop
Thu, Jul 21st 2016 12:37p Ben PooleI have a recurring, not to mention infuriating, issue with Fusion which has existed since I started using the software in those heady beta days (2007?). To wit: drag n drop from the host to the guest OS just stops working for no apparent reason. Occasionally, this extends to copy and paste too. One way to address this is to restart the VM (bah!) or when it gets really bad, repair the VMWare Tools installation. Nasty.
When the problem happened again today, I decided to dig a little deeper, and f

16

The new post-fact age
Wed, Jul 20th 2016 9:20a Ben PooleIt’s terrifying, especially hot on the heels of the brexit farce here in the UK. Consider this comment, made in a book four years ago and derided at the time:
The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
We’re

Perspective on the loss of a Prince
Mon, Apr 25th 2016 12:40p Ben PooleQuite rightly, the world has gone nuts over the loss of Prince Nelson Rogers last week. Hell, I’m listening to some of his music right now, and I’ve had some insanely sad moments this weekend pondering his death, whilst also thinking about the other entertainers we’ve lost so far in 2016 (Alan Rickman, Victoria Wood, David Bowie, Ronnie Corbett, Paul Daniels and many, many more).
But this stuff happens. We need a little perspective as people lament the passing of genius. No, w

19

Microsoft just got even more interesting
Mon, Apr 18th 2016 8:15a Ben PooleOver the past few years, I’ve had cause to tinker with Visual Studio and its stable-mates more and more. Quite a few corporates have laid their eggs in the Microsoft basket, and the tooling is better than ever. .NET, Entity Framework, Web API, MVC .NET&hellip; some Good Things have been happening, all spurred on by intitiatives like “coding-by-convention”, the rise of node.js with its simple approach to the server runtime.
I was mildly interested when Microsoft announced Visual Studio